Stimulus reality falls short of expectations for new jobs

With 4,000 new jobs created out of a predicted 40,000, officials wrestle with falling short of high expectations

By Brian Lockhart, STAFF WRITER

Published 3:56 am, Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Whenever Gov. M. Jodi Rell talks about a project funded by federal stimulus money, she emphasizes the importance of using the funds to put people to work.

"This project is important for a lot of reasons, but the most important is job creation," Rell said in late July during a stop in Wilton to speak about planned improvements to Metro-North's line linking Norwalk and Danbury. "Ultimately, that is what the stimulus is all about."

But the total number of people being put to work in Connecticut remains in question, and the data available are far less than what federal officials had promised.

Matthew Fritz, a Rell staffer overseeing distribution of the $3 billion Connecticut received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, said about 4,000 new jobs have been created in the state so far.

That is a tenth of the 40,000 jobs promised by federal lawmakers such as U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who cited the figure recently during an address to the Chamber of Commerce in his hometown of Stamford.

"The 40,000 was a number the White House provided based on their estimates," Lieberman spokesman Scott Overland said Monday.

Asked a similar question, U.S. Rep Jim Himes' office in an e-mail Tuesday referred to an early February interview with economist and stimulus proponent Mark Zandi, founder of Moody's Economy.com and former advisor to GOP presidential candidate John McCain.

"The models are based on historic experience," Zandi said at the time on employmentspectator.com. "And we're outside anything we've experienced historically. We're completely in a world we don't understand and know. ... There's a high level of uncertainty."

Fritz is familiar with the 40,000 figure but said, "It's never been well-understood where that number came from. I think they did a simplistic formula: so many thousands of dollars represents a job."

So what has been the Rell administration's jobs goal?

"The task before us now is to identify the projects that will do the most to get people back to work, get our economy moving again and position us for success when the national business climate improves," Rell said Feb. 11, when she announced a bipartisan working group to sift through hundreds of proposals for stimulus spending.

But in announcing projects, such as the work on the Norwalk-to-Danbury rail line, state officials were often unable to explain how many jobs are being created.

"Clearly, we'd love to see 40,000 jobs," Fritz said.

He said the focus has been on obtaining as much stimulus funding as possible.

"We've really looked at getting as many dollars back to Connecticut as we can," Fritz said, adding that the final amount will likely surpass the original $3 billion. "That has been our foremost priority versus looking at the number of jobs, because it is hard to estimate the types of jobs that will be created."

But questions are beginning to be asked. Earlier this week, The Associated Press reported that some state labor leaders and construction industry representatives believe Connecticut has been too slow to get stimulus dollars out the door to begin work this year.